Asus AC68U or AC88U?

[d4kk0n]

Hello guys I'm trying to figure out what router to buy to upgrade my ISP one. I've been looking quite a lot and both the AC68U and the AC88U keep popping up. I'm a gamer and have 4 wired connections. Another person in my house streams netflix on 1080p and there is a laptop also connected to the wireless network.
Is the price difference worth it? The AC88U costs twice as much as the AC68U in my country (300 Euros vs 150). Please advise me!

Btw if you have any other suggestions besides these 2 routers please feel free to suggest!

 

[avtella]

You should be fine with the AC68U.

 

[yk101]

I would say they either will work, but AC88U has 4 extra ports and another 256Mb of RAM. Depending on what else you may want this router to do, this difference may be worth the extra money!

 

[d4kk0n]

I would say they either will work, but AC88U has 4 extra ports and another 256Mb of RAM. Depending on what else you may want this router to do, this difference may be worth the extra money!

Such as?

 

[yk101]

Running custom scripts, or loading additional applications?

 

[d4kk0n]

No, nothing like that. The big question here, mainly, is if online gaming experience benefits from the AC88U (taking into consideration that other devices in my home might be taking bandwidth) or is it just a marketing gimmick from Asus to spend additional money for nothing.

 

[yk101]

Can't say. I don't play games. :-(

 

[avtella]

I don't think it will really help improve your game-play over the AC68U. If you want the AC88U get it for a little bit better range, better OpenVPN performance and file transfers and port aggregation if you have a NAS.

 

[System Error Message]

There are many options not just asus, even linksys, netgear, tp link and so on. If you want MU-MIMO go for the qualcomm based ones. The additional 4 ports on the AC88U are bottlenecked (sure people argue its the same as attaching a 5 port switch but its in the same device, no reason to have bottlenecks or to not make use of the additional RGMII available on the switch chip. The mikrotik RB3000 has 2 5 port switches, each having 2Gb/s to CPU). If you want a router for the ports, go with mikrotik. CCRs can give you 12 gigabit ethernet ports, the RB1100AHx2 can give you 13 and even the RB3000 has 10 + SFP. For the switch chips on mikrotik with 1Gb/s to CPU you can connect the switches together externally for even more links.

Hence why my advice against the AC88U, just not worth the cost of the extra 4 ports unless you plan to attach 1Gb/s device + 3 100Mb/s device for example to the extra ports. Network printers, raspberry pis are example devices with only 100Mb/s ethernet.

Routers are routers, your gameplay isnt going to be improve just by going for asus, what asus calls by gaming is simply the look and a few unnecessary features (like WTFast vpn). a good router like mikrotik can do so much more as evident by netduma which is basically mikrotik with a friendlier interface. A lot of people complain that ASUS routers QoS profiles gives bad latency when tested but it could be that the QoS is set to give games the priority they need with everything else second. Same can be achieved on mikrotik and other routers too. For consumer routers you'd need to be able to get on the underlaying OS to configure some complicated QoS.

So pick between these variants for not just asus, other brands. Look at both the hardware and firmware if it fits what you want (remember there is no such thing as a gaming router as far as routing goes, only router related features like QoS type available, port forwarding, etc).
The AC1900, the AC3200 (2x AC1900 5Ghz), AC3100 (MU-MIMO), AC2600 (qualcomm MU-MIMO), AC3200 (other MU-MIMO with 2x 5Ghz radios such as the linksys wrt).

 

[pege63]

There is also the RB3011UiAS-RM for 124 EURO or RB2011UiAS-RM for 79 EURO, the
RB1100AHx2 goes for 231 EURO